The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the year’s great event movies. It is also a film where you wonder what went wrong. Forget the lofty expectations, and pull out your pipe. The first few puffs are snowy and fabulous, the last leave much to be desired.

Four shell-shocked children from Finchley are neatly labelled and delivered by steam train to a crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere. Any security they ever felt has been turned to rubble by the Blitz. Their lives are in shreds. Their new guardians are as grim and intimidating as Everest. But God bless hide and seek. This simple game leads ten-year-old Lucy (Georgie Henley) into the madcap world of Narnia, a pristine land of mythic adventure.

The portal is a giant wardrobe, a thing of threat and beauty. It sits in a bare attic room looking dusty, ugly and unloved. Young viewers will be mesmerised by the moth-eaten fur coats that suddenly give way to snow. Adults will love the nonsense: tea and sardines with a friendly faun; a London lamp post in the middle of a forest, an ice palace littered with petrified corpses.

Only four humans — those born of Adam and Eve — can melt the terminal winter that grips this myth. It’s this quest to turn Narnia into summer that shapes the drama.

One of the children, Edmund (Skandar Keynes), falls instantly in love with Tilda Swinton’s terrific White Witch. I can’t blame him. She is the mesmerising evil in Andrew Adamson’s film. Edmund’s love of Turkish delight scuppers the plot. He is forgiven by a digitalised lion god called Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson). But Swinton is the icy joy when it comes to the crunch. She is the beautiful witch who promises the Earth only to slap you in chains. She sticks a fatal blade into Aslan, the mythic ruler of Narnia, who sacrifices both life and kingdom to save the disgraced Edmund.

Clive Staples Lewis knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote these slim books. The Christian allegory is indigestible. He recycles biblical myths for young and impressionable minds. But his books are playfully distant — Adamson pours the lessons on with a trowel. The sentiments are mawkish. The film bores.

But I’m not actually bothered about the poisonous debate about feeding the minds of starving evangelical believers. I suspect children will still love the visceral clashes when both sides muster armies for the mighty showdown — and forget the whole damn thing by supper.

What annoys me is the second-hand horror: villains who can’t act, masks made of plastic, minotaurs that look as if they are stuffed bull’s heads that have been wrenched off a wall and screwed on top of complaining extras. Where’s the imagination in that?

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